Sony PlayStation Network: Still Down on Day Four, Fix by Tuesday?

If your gaming network is down and you know it, clap your hands. You should hear the furious sound of clapping emanating from Sony headquarters, as we’re now into day four of the PlayStation Network outage.
For those of you still scratching your heads as to why your console is throwing up error message “80710A06″ whenever you try to connect up to play some online Mortal Kombat, Portal 2, or SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs–talk about a bad week for the network to go down–let’s recap.
The outage officially began on Wednesday with Sony itself noting, that evening, that, “We’re aware certain functions of PlayStation Network are down.” The note came straight from the mouth, er, keys of senior director of corporate communications and social media Patrick Seybold. And that was just the beginning.
Seybold jumped back onto the Sony PlayStation blog on Thursday with a bit of worse news: The network was still down, Sony was investigating, and it might be a day or two before gamers can jump online and frag their friends again. The online community reacted with a bit of frustration, but patience: It’s not like major online console services haven’t been down for inexplicable—and longer—periods of time before.
Friday rolled around and Seybold brought back the same news as before: Network’s still down. However, he did shed a bit of new light on the reasons behind the downtime. According to Seybold, Sony purposefully shut the network down to address an “external intrusion” that hit the PlayStation Network and the company’s Qriocity service.
Sony didn’t go into any additional details as to what that “external intrusion” might have been, but unverified reports suggest that a denial-of-service attack targeted the primary PlayStation Network server. As well, additional denial-of-service attacks allegedly went after PlayStation Network servers that house user account information and, according to the report from PlayStation Universe, administrator developer accounts were even breached at one point.
Initial suggestions pointed fingers at Anonymous–the hactivist group that previously targeted Sony with alleged denial-of-service attacks. Pundits thought that Anonymous had re-upped its retribution campaign against Sony for the company’s legal pursuit against alleged PS3 jailbreaker George Hotz.
According to a Saturday blog update from Seybold, Sony is taking this unexpected moment to rebuild its infrastructure even better than before–hence the continued delay.
“Though this task is time-consuming, we decided it was worth the time necessary to provide the system with additional security,” Seybold wrote.
Sony officials have yet to issue an ETA for when the network might reappear. However, the source speaking to PlayStation Universe claims that Japanese servers should start reappearing on Monday, with U.S. and E.U. servers popping back up on Tuesday.